There was a moment in the Foreign Policy debate in Boca Raton when Obama said indignantly:

Look, Governor Romney’s called for $5 trillion of tax cuts that he says he’s going to pay for by closing deductions. Now the math doesn’t work, but he continues to claim that he’s going to do it. He then wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending the our military is not asking for.

Well I almost spewed my coffee all over my keyboard. Barack Obama who has run up a trillion dollars more debt every year, who sent a budget to Congress that even his own Democrats rejected unanimously, who double counts the same numbers, and who has dreamed up a health care plan so noxious that Secretary Sebelius has to issue waivers to practically every participant. That Barack Obama is going to challenge Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on math? Really? To quote Barack Obama on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno:

“The math stuff was fine up until about 7th grade,” Obama said. After that “I’m pretty lost.”

That is possibly why he never mentions that 16 trillion number. He does have trouble with numbers, he simply can’t seem to get them right.

— Obama has a new ad out in which he claims to have added 5.2 million new jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has eked out a net gain of 325,000 new jobs since January 2009, when Obama first took office.

President Obama claimed that the idea of using deep, automatic, across-the-board domestic and defense spending cuts to force Congress to address the nation’s growing federal deficit originated with Congress, not the White House.

“What the president said is not correct,” Woodward said Tuesday. “He’s mistaken and it’s refuted by the people who work for him.”

— Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show. The Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia asserted responsibility for the attacks. The man who made the video supposedly to blame for everything, remains in solitary confinement until “after the election.”

— Now that there’s only about two weeks until the election, the Obama campaign has issued a leaflet that “describes” Obama’s agenda for the next four years. Lots of pictures of Obama, and it trumpets “green energy” as an avenue of economic growth. Not very likely. The list of bankrupt solar and battery companies continues to grow. There is no second term agenda, only more of the first.

China began a state-led bailout of solar companies to save them from the crashing price of solar panels. Their attempt to save the industry is projected to cost about $11 billion. Siemens and GE’s energy division are souring on green energy. In the third quarter, wind-turbine sales fell 69 percent, reducing the energy division’s profits by 20 percent. DuPont sees a flat market for solar panels in 2013. Germany is facing 800,000 people in dire fuel poverty. With the EPA’s radical power-grab for after the election, we may be facing fuel poverty as well.

— Coal remains the nation’s principal source of electric power generation because it’s cheap. In terms of real dollars per unit of energy, the cost of generating electricity from coal is a fraction of the cost of any other energy source. The recent boom in shale gas production has led to an over-supply of natural gas and lower prices. But for natural gas to become the dominant feedstock for power generation, there are problems of infrastructure, transmission to storage and pipeline capacity. President Obama touts his “All of the Above” energy policy, but like so much of the Obama agenda, it’s only words.

Plentiful cheap energy means that America can be a world leader in manufacturing, plentiful energy means plentiful jobs. Nationally 175 coal-fired power plants are scheduled to be shut down from 2012 to 2016. The EPA has advanced a series of major environmental regulations totaling billions in new operating costs and compliance costs, unprecedented in scope and cost.

The National Economic Research Associates reported that only two of the proposed EPA regulations could lead to a net employment loss of 60,000 jobs just in Pennsylvania between now and 2020. The EPA wants to shut down coal production and power generation. They also want to shut down Hydraulic Fracturing. If we shut down these annoying sources of power, then people will be forced to turn to the energy sources of the future. Except they aren’t. Solar energy is too diffuse, and cannot exist without vast government subsidies; Wind is too intermittent.

— Perhaps it’s time to turn the “math stuff” over to a couple of men who thoroughly understand balance sheets, budgets, how to cut spending, and the intricacies of why so many businesses are not hiring under the Obama economy. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have demonstrated expertise, and they got a long way past 7th grade.